Starbucks to offer free college degree to workers

Starbucks will provide a free online college education to thousands of its workers, without requiring that they remain with the company, through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company and the university will announce on June 16.

The program is open to any of the company’s 135,000 U.S. employees, provided they work at least 20 hours a week and have the grades and test scores to gain admission to Arizona State.

For a barista with at least two years of college credit, the company will pay full tuition; for those with fewer credits Starbucks will pay part of the cost, but even for many of them, courses will be free. with government and university aid.

“Starbucks is going where no other major corporation has gone,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, a group focused on education. “For many of these Starbucks employees, an online university education is the only reasonable way they’re going to get a bachelor’s degree.”

Many employers offer tuition reimbursement. But those programs usually come with limitations such as the full cost not being paid, requiring that workers stay for years afterward, or limiting reimbursement to work-related courses.

Starbucks is, in effect, inviting its workers, from the day they join the company, to study whatever they like, and then leave whenever they like – knowing that many of them, degrees in hand, will leave for better-paying jobs.

Even if they did, their experience “would be accreted to our brand, our reputation and our business,” Howard D. Schultz, the company’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview. “I believe it will lower attrition, it’ll increase performance, it’ll attract and retain better people.”

The Starbucks program sounds like a boon to Abraham G. Cervantes, 24, who lives in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles with his mother and two of his brothers, and would be the first in his family to earn a college degree. “I’m the only one in the family with a steady job,” he said. In fact, he has two jobs – one at Starbucks, and another at a music studio.

Michael Bojorquez Echevarria, 23, a Starbucks barista in the San Fernando Valley, grew up in the Bay Area, the child of immigrants from Mexico, and saw the limitations that a lack of education had placed on them, he said, adding that he has always believed that “I have to be one of those people who can say we made it.”

“My ultimate vision, what I’m striving for, is to work with children who have gone through physical or emotional abuse,” he said.

For now, he is working toward an associate’s degree in sociology. He works about 60 hours a week at two different Starbucks locations, where he said the regular customers asked about his studies and egged him on.

“Imagine just waking up one day and knowing that your whole degree would be paid for, and the only thing you have to do is enroll and study and be a good student,” he said. “It would change my lifestyle, the whole dynamic of what I do every day.”

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